Onward to Canada

 

Sunday (7/31) to Wednesday (8/3):

We said our goodbyes in Essex Junction and headed south on I-89 towards New Hampshire. We travelled about 165 miles to a campground near Concord NH called Cascade Campground. It is actually located in Loudon NH south of the NASCAR track. We were assigned to one of the short term sites in the back of the campground and made our way through the winding, narrow road to a gravel pull through site with full hookups. The site was not level front to back or side to side so we had a tough time trying to get the Duchess level. We managed to get close to level and called it quits since we were only there for the night. We did have 50 amp electric service along with water and sewer connections. We spent several hours doing laundry and get caught up on our banking activities with a pretty good internet Wi-Fi service. The campground is mainly for seasonal campers and all of the roads in the park are packed sand/gravel mix. The campground does have a small creek that runs along side the park, but with the drought here in the northeast not much water was running through it. The next morning we hitched up the Jeep and headed down the road to Maine.

We drove about 130 miles but it took us almost 4 hours since we were taking the scenic route and going through lots of small towns. We stopped for the night at the KOA near Gardiner ME that is located south of Augusta. The campground is an old KOA and we opted for a water/electric pull through site since we were only spending the night and had done our laundry the night before. We had to back out of our pull through site since there was no way we were going to make the turn onto the road in front of our site.

Tuesday we drove 200 miles north to Calais ME where we will spend the night before crossing over to Canada. The sides of the road along I-95 reminded us of east Texas. The sun was shining, we found a radio station that played 1970’s music and the road was in good shape. LIFE IS GOOD. We saw several signs telling us to watch out for moose crossing the road. We had reservations in a small campground located a few miles east of town called Keene's Lake Family Campground. We drove about 1/2 mile down a wash board gravel road to get to the campground. We got set up and then went into town to pick up a prescription at Walmart along with picking up a few other items. In the evening we went into town again to eat dinner. On the way out of the campground we stopped and Connie picked a few wild blue berries. They were much sweeter than we were expecting. We ate at Karen’s Korner Pub & Grill where Connie had a “lobstah” roll and I had the fish & chips. Both were delicious. The town was having music in the park across the street from the restaurant and we stopped for a while and listened to a two person band (bass & lead guitar) who were very good. They played country, blue grass, folk and some 1960’s music.